A collection of Tom's articles and other news from Tom's Fitness and Martial Arts in Paris, IL.

Saturday, November 02, 2013

BIGGEST LOSER "18" -- WEEK SIX

We reached the halfway point of the 12 week program with this week’s Monday night meeting and workout. Overall, things seem to be on track for most of them, although the numbers are down as expected.

If you’ve been paying attention to the last few Biggest Losers, you’ll recall that about half of the participants typically drop out for one reason or another. This has held true over the other 17 Biggest Loser groups we’ve run, and it seems to be holding true now.

We started with 24 people, and at this point it looks like we have about 18 still involved. As I mentioned earlier, the reasons tend to vary. One thing is sure though; it’s pretty hard to get what you want if you stop trying to get it.

Over the years I’ve learned 7 steps that have helped me and others achieve goals in a variety of things, including weight loss:

Since we were halfway through, we talked about whether their results have been measuring up to their expectations. If so, that’s awesome. Keep on trucking. If not, then we have to try to figure out what’s going wrong and make some changes.

Have they been hitting it hard? Getting all their workouts in? Getting the eating right? Is something else going on? They need to try and zero in on the thing or things that have been throwing them off track. The tough thing is to modify their behavior so they start getting the results they want. It always is.

To keep turning it up on the exercise side of things, I gave them an 11 station, 3 round circuit (since 11 people showed up for the workout). As usual in circuits, they spent a minute at each station, working for 45-50 seconds, and using the last 10-15 seconds to rotate to the next station.

After they hit all 11 stations, they got a 1 minute break to get a quick drink between the 2nd and 3rd rounds. This amounted to a 35 minute workout with 33 actual minutes working out. The first round was fairly easy, the second round was tough, and consensus was, the third and final round was really tough.

Most of them felt like they’d been working out much longer. They also thought they’d worked out much harder than in a typical hour long cardio workout. Here’s what they did:

This week’s Biggest Loser was Tracy Whitaker who lost 3.6 lbs and 2.5% of her body weight. Debbie Eveland placed second, losing 2.8 lbs and 2.1%. Third place went to Jeremy Whitaker who lost 2.8 lbs and 1.5%.

For more information, you can reach me at the gym, email at tomdolanfitness@gmail.com, or through Facebook at www.facebook/tomdolanfitness!